You loved me not at all, but let it go; I loved you more than life, but let it be. As the more injured party, this being so, The hour’s amenities are all to me— The choice of weapons; and I gravely choose To let the weapons tarnish where they lie, And spend the night in eloquent abuse Of senators and popes and such small fry And meet the morning standing, and at odds With heaven and earth and hell and any fool That calls his soul his own, and all the gods, And all the children getting dressed for school... And you will leave me, and I shall entomb What’s cold by then in an adjoining room.
Why do you chide me that, when mortals yield To slumber's charm, from sleep I ask no boon, But from my casement watch the maimed moon Fainting behind her ineffectual shield: Unto the chime by stately planets pealed My song, my soul, my very self attune, And nightly see, what none can see at noon, The runic volume of the sky unsealed? Haply the hour may come when grateful Night Will these brief vigils endlessly repay, And, on the dwindling of my earthly day, Keep, like her stars, my heavenly fancies bright; And glorious dreamings, shrouded now from sight, Dawn out of darkness, not to sleep for aye.
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Track 1
How this picture is made
What a fractal is
A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. The large form and the small form are the same kind of thing. A poem can be drawn that way. The shape of the whole comes from the shape of the lines.
Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.
How the boundary is drawn
The number under the picture is the poem constant. It is read from the build of the lines: their length, how uneven they are, the size of the stanzas, the share of vowels, and the way the lines end. A new word moves the number when it changes that build. The same poem always gives the same number.
Drawn on its own, that number sits in a quiet part of the plane, and most poems would look like the same soft disk. So the number is carried outward along its own direction until it meets the edge of the Mandelbrot set, where the shape turns sharp. The picture is the Julia set of that meeting place.
Each point on the canvas is folded again and again by one small rule. Points that stay near the rule form the dark interior. Points that rush away become the coloured bands. The hue comes from the poem constant, and the brightest bands turn toward gold. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.
What the branching signifies
Branching draws the poem as a tree. Each turn follows a line, and every smaller branch repeats that pattern. A longer line reaches farther. The letters at the start of a line bend the next turn. A higher share of vowels opens the branches wider.
The trunk takes its colour from the poem constant and warms toward gold at the tips. When the poem has more than one stanza, gold forks leave the trunk. Each fork is a stanza beyond the first, up to three. The tree divides where the poem divides. One stanza remains a single trunk.